Budget-Friendly Content Marketing Strategies Your Brand can Employ

Marketing your brand is vital for a business, but a small budget can be a challenge. You don’t even need to have thousands of dollars to develop a robust marketing strategy. In fact, there a few factors which are far more important than investment.

Marketing your brand is vital for a business, but a small budget can be a challenge. You don’t even need to have thousands of dollars to develop a robust marketing strategy. In fact, there a few factors which are far more important than investment.

A little creativity and some marketing basics can turn a tight budget into sales. Take Kraft for example, who report that their ROI on content marketing alone is four times more than other advertising tactics.

Small businesses on a shoestring budget often feel like they don’t have enough money to really invest in content marketing. In reality, however, what you really need to make the most of your content marketing is not money. What you need is time, effort, and perseverance.

Six Ideas to get you Started on Boosting Your Business With Content Marketing

1. Tap Influencer Networks

If you just started your brand, chances are you only have a small audience. To help you begin gathering traffic, turn to influencer networks for help.

It’s not always necessary to grow your own audience from scratch. Instead, look to the more established brands, forums, and influencers in your line of business. Reach out to them for cooperative posts or even just some advice on how they got to where they are.

Finding opportunities for content placement and creation with already established brands is one of the best ways to get your product off the ground.

For example, if you’re a newly opened cosmetics brand, you could pay an established makeup guru to rate and sample your products. Not only does this help to advertise your brand but it also provides the credibility of the influencer you tapped into.

Professional relationships with peers in your industry are one of the most important things you can do as a fledgling business. For those of you who own a more established company, finding more contacts is integral to ongoing success.

2. Have a Different Etiquette on Personal Networks

A lot of business owners have confused social and content marketing with persistent updates to their personal contacts or email lists. Even if this strategy is easy and cheap, this approach can be downright annoying to the user.

With the size of most people’s social circles, this tactic of inundating friends and family with constant posts will only lead to them disabling or muting notifications from your business. To really make the most of this small circle, create highly-actionable and personalized content.

Marketing content to your personal network isn’t about getting your friends and family to see everything that your company is doing. Instead, it should be a way to improve the image of both you and your company in a succinct, effective, and personal way.

For example, let’s say you’re a gym owner. Instead of posting all the hot new subscription deals that your gym is offering, give a glimpse into the day-to-day operations. This is a perfect opportunity for video content.

Think of user-generated content. With a gym customer’s permission, share their personal training progress with your social media. This will provide a positive and relatable image to your prospective customers.

It’s important to remember that the metric for this category is not monetary. Your gains will be in the form of ideas, feedback and, hopefully, word-of-mouth referrals.

3. Invest in Your Own Network

Along with tapping into influencer networks and utilizing your personal relationships, you should also invest in establishing your business audience. Your business audience should be the main artery of your company’s sales and customers.

If you have an account on social media, you can generate business without a physical store or a website. However, to do this, you’ll need to have relevant and actionable content.

We all know how inundated sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are at the moment with ads, but it’s still the best avenue for promoting your content.

However, to be seen among such a large crowd, don’t just publish product images and bland, uninteresting content. Instead, start engaging your audience through polls and contests. A great way to do this is to relate your brand to ongoing social trends and interesting topics.

The most important thing to remember when building your audience is that quality is far more important than quantity. One well-thought-out post or image can bring in ten times more business than an endless stream of automated text and links.

4. Make Your Content Work Harder

While you may not be able to create content on a daily basis, take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way.

To do this, it might be a good idea to look towards your personal network for help. Ask your friend with a camera to help you video a day in the life of the business or maybe reach out to your aunt who has a knack for poster and image design.

Remember to be grateful to these people and pay them back in kind. If money is a little tight, most people are happy to be paid back through favors, discounts, or free products or services from your business

This more personal production of content can lead to far more resources for you. Being humble and gracious creates a more personal company image.

To add to this, your content doesn’t have to be purposefully made for one post or site. Recycle, repurpose, update, and share your content on social media and your peer networks to make the most out of your investment.

Also, link out your new content to already published pieces to keep the reader on your page for longer.

Most importantly, remember that content can come from anywhere at anytime. Don’t just move through conventional means to get the best content. Thinking outside the box is the best way to get posts and images which can bring in plenty of new customers and sales.

5. Personalize the Story

As a brand, it is essential to have a good customer base and ongoing communication with your audience.

Content marketing doesn’t exactly mean just posting text, photos or videos to your pages and supporting sites. It also means injecting yourself into the content you create. Personality and brand image are vital to promoting your content and business.

Without the human element, most customers will just ignore your content for more attractive, personal posts.

Take the time to understand and see what your customers prefer and create content that suits their needs and personality. Keep open communication with your customers and remember that they’re not just a resource of money but also people just like you.

Adding your own spin and appealing to your customers’ interests is one of the best ways of standing out of the crowd, especially on social media.

Businesses that personalize their content have the advantage over automated stores. Like I mentioned above, quality always beats quantity.

6. The Content is the Product

Lastly, meaningful and provocative content is a great way of promoting your business, but don’t forget to actually advertise your product.

This may seem like an obvious statement to make, but it is common for many companies to get lost in their ideas. Always remember that the foundation of any content you produce should have two goals:

Starting a meaningful conversation, and

Increasing sales or visibility.

Online and in virtual stores, customers don’t know how smooth dresses are and how beautiful it would look on them. Make sure your content brings some real-world elements online with descriptive copy, engaging videos, or well-produced images.

Customers will only rely on how you describe your product and the quality of the photos placed on the product page, so don’t rely on the product to do all the advertising for you.

Also, don’t forget to enhance your webpage with user experience in mind. The easier your page is to navigate, the more likely a user is to stay on your page and make a purchase.

Some of the best ways to implement these changes without investing too much is making your customer reviews more visible, adding an About Us page, and promoting your returns policy.

Takeaways

Content and social marketing don’t have to be expensive or draining practices.

If you keep these few factors in mind, you’ll find it far easier to create a great content marketing strategy: